2.4 Relationships that turn love bitter
Co–dependency gets counted as a kind of love, problematic of course, but still love.
The way I see it, though, first and foremost…
Co-dependency is a demand for personal allegiance.
It’s as if I were…
Demanding that you be loyal to the tribe of me.
It’s not an offer of simple, straight–forward, sustaining love.
Maybe there’s genuine love in the mix, but what dominates, what underlies a co–dependent relationship at its deepest level is that core demand for allegiance.
Co–dependency begins with a deficit. In my case, when I got shut down as a kid, that left a hole in my heart.
As I moved into my early adult years, I got to work on that hole, but I wasn’t able to fix it. It was too deep and, I didn’t know it then, but it was going to take me a long time to get it fixed. In the meantime, I wanted love.
So I decided to look outside myself for a solution. Specifically, I decided I needed to find a woman who could take care of my problems for me, because women were supposed to be good at that kind of thing.
I had to do a lot of searching but finally I found Gina. I fell for her, and fell hard, because I thought she was my answer. I thought she was going to…
Make all my hurts go away.
There are men who become a slouch on the couch while their partner does all the relationship work. That wasn’t me. Both Gina and I were high–functioning co–dependents, which made the problem harder to see.
When I committed to her, I kicked into high gear. I gave her everything I was able to give her. I championed her, I helped her make a major life breakthrough, I midwifed important new friendships for her, I gave her nonstop emotional support.
Looking back I can see the deal I made with her was this…
I’ll serve you and in return you save me.
This was an unconscious deal, so we never talked about it and didn’t know what we were really doing with each other. Or to each other.
What I later realized about Gina is that, like me, she had a hole in her heart, too. She had a serious deficit that came from serious childhood abuse.
So while I was wanting her to fix me, I think she was wanting me to fix her.
And there’s the co– in co–dependency.
But let’s take a deeper look at the dependency in co–dependency, because…
It can turn destructive, even dangerous.
If I want you to save me and you don’t, because you can’t, because nobody can, still, being unconscious about what’s going on in our relationship, I begin to resent you, and as things get worse between us, I might slip into rage. Against you.
I’ll blame you because in my co-dependent fantasy, I believe that you promised to save me and now you’re going back on your promise.
I call this kind of rage…
Mystery rage.
Because as long as couples remain unconscious about what’s really going on in their relationship, it remains a mystery. And therefore impossible to resolve.
And then when co–dependent couples break up, if they still don’t understand the structure of co–dependency, their break–up can turn bitter. And rageful. It can turn into a mutual destruction derby. And why?
Because if I am utterly dependent on you, and you’re leaving me, that feels existential. It feels like death, the death of my hopes for myself and my future.
Truth is we each need to do our own self–development work. No one can take that journey for us.
Why are co–dependent relationships so common given how much trouble they are and how badly they end? I think tribal allegiance offers an explanation.
It’s so much easier for two people to settle into an allegiance arrangement than to do the work it would take to resolve childhood issues and achieve emotional maturity and master the kind of negotiation that robust, sustaining relationships require.
I think, given our history…
Tribal allegiance is so much easier for us humans than personal love.
Gina and I did not last long. Which made me very sad because there was so much about her I sincerely loved. But it was also fortunate, because we quit before we got to bitterness. We parted feeling a wistful disappointment in each other.
Years later, I was thinking about her, fondly, cherishing some of our best memories, when the co–dependency of it all suddenly slammed me, and I understood that what we were doing was…
Mutual exploitation.
A painful thing to have to say and I hated thinking of us in that way because there was some real love I had for her. Still this was an accurate diagnosis. The most accurate.
And immediately I decided…
I can’t ever do that again.
Not to myself and not to anybody else.
And I took this decision as a vow because…
I hate exploitation.
I hate it with all my heart.
I had done the standard reading on co–dependent relationships and learned about the ins and outs of them, the layers of complexities, the ways people get tangled up. But this sudden understanding was like…
Cutting the Gordian knot.
I felt like I had slashed through all the complications. I had taken the mystery out of the mystery rage.
And now, as a consequence, if someone comes to me offering the temptation of co–dependency, I have an immediate, negative physical reaction and politely but firmly bow out of the offer.
The way I see it…
Co-dependency does not count as love.
In fact…
It’s the enemy of love.
